Daniel Allen waited patiently on his doorstep for the police to arrive as his rented bungalow burned with three generations of the same family including a baby lying dead within its scorched walls.
On a February day in 2018 that Derrylin in Northern Ireland will never forget, the quadruple-killer had to be pushed aside by people trying in vain to battle the blaze and save the four people inside.
Burning roof tiles had rained down on Allen but the 33-year-old quadruple-killer refused to move and told neighbours: ‘Don’t go in. They’re all gone’.
He had stood looking towards the gate, seemingly with little interest in the blaze raging behind him, before seeking out a police officer to ask who was going to arrest him. ‘I’m sorry… I started the fire. A promise is a promise. I promised to put them to the next life as they didn’t want to stay here no more’, he was heard saying.
Despite the chaos at the scene, Allen had immediately began pushing claims that he set the blaze as part of a suicide pact with his partner Denise Gossett, who was handcuffed to a bed as he stood uninjured outside. With her in the burning building was her daughter Sabrina, 19, son Roman, 16, and Sabrina’s 15-month-old daughter Morgana Quinn.
Today MailOnline can reveal there is growing anger in Fermanagh, especially amongst those who witnessed the fire, that he was allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of manslaughter for killing Denise when the deaths of her children and grandchild were treated as murder.
Many believe Denise has been denied justice and even the judge who sentenced him to 29 years admitted he had ‘scepticism and doubts about his version of events’.
Neighbour Maureen McGerty watched the tragedy unfold from her kitchen window. She told how she was washing the dishes after breakfast when she saw the smoke and initially thought it was a bog on fire.
‘I don’t believe that bulls**t [story] of a suicide pact. He should have got the electric chair’, she told MailOnline. Mrs McGerty added: ‘To think that a whole family was wiped out is hard to take in. I didn’t know them — not many did about here’.
Denise had choked to death on the smoke while Roman and baby Morgana Quinn died after being poisoned with fatal levels of the sedative and date rape drug GHB. Allen claimed he had strangled Sabrina but due to the fire her cause of death could not be ascertained.
Allen has now started a 29-year jail term – one of the longest in recent Northern Irish history.
But the judge who sentenced him last month also raised doubts about Allen’s claims, calling it a ‘strange suicide pact where one person dies and one escapes uninjured’.
It has also emerged that Allen had met a new woman online just before the fire. She lived in America and he had hatched plans to move to the United States to be with her because of their love of the fantasy roleplaying game World of Warcraft.
Their last communication was two days before the killings and around the same time he had bought a significant amount of gas for delivery, apparently to ensure the house would be totally destroyed if a fire broke out.
Allen was said to have had ‘total control over the family’ – forcing them to use different names and cutting them off from the community, while he ‘lived most of his life online’.
He was a troubled and violent loner had met Denise online as she battled to get away from an abusive partner, speaking to her in a BDSM sex chat room in 2016 and moving in together within months.
Neighbours in Derrylin said Allen and his family were rarely seen in public, the children were not in school and supermarket delivery drivers were even told to leave food at the gate and leave.
Kerrie Flood from Fermanagh Women’s Aid told MailOnline: ‘So from the very beginning, when emergency services responded, my understanding is that he set the narrative – and that narrative was that there had been this suicide pact. This is something that abusive men who wipe out families tend to do – the abuser sets the narrative’.
As well as being a ‘horrific and cruel’ murderer, Allen is a habitual liar and domestic abuser with a history of violence and making threats to kill and allegations he raped one woman.
Initially, during police interview, Allen ‘largely took a ‘no comment’ stance. But the true sickening details about the last hours of their lives, as well as the terror they suffered living with the control freak would later emerge.
Mr Justice O’Hara said that pleas were entered by Allen on the basis that in killing Denise it was ‘a suicide pact’.
Allen asserted that it was Sabrina who was responsible for administering fatal doses of GHB to her baby and her brother, but that he was aware of the plan and pleaded guilty to their murder as a secondary party.
He also confessed to strangling Sabrina and claimed ‘there had been discussions’ between them around suicide ‘but this was not sufficient to amount to a suicide pact – on that basis he pleaded guilty to her murder.
In his judgment, Mr Justice O’Hara stated: ‘While I can express my scepticism and doubts about his version of events (which have repeatedly changed when speaking to different individuals) the end result in terms of sentencing may not be very different.’
Northern Ireland‘s Public Prosecution Service, Ulster’s version of the Crown Prosecution Service, has been put under pressure to explain why they allowed him to plead guilty to manslaughter rather than murder.
While the sentence may have been the same, campaigners say there is a growing and worrying trend of prosecutors allowing dangerous suspects to plead guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility rather than murder.
There was volcanic anger in Nottingham in a similar case that ended in January.
Grieving mother Emma Webber insisted the deaths of her son Barnaby, his fellow student Grace O’Malley-Kumar and school caretaker Ian Coates were murders.
In a three-minute address outside Nottingham Crown Court in January, she said ‘true justice has not been served’ and claimed the victims’ families had been ‘railroaded’ into accepting paranoid schizophrenic Valdo Calocane’s plea of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility – rather than the offence of murder.
In Allen’s case, the PPS has defended its decision as ‘the correct course to follow’ – but admitted that they had initially agreed to prosecute him for four murders but changed their mind in June 2023 when they were contacted by the killer’s lawyers.
A Public Prosecution Service spokeswoman told MailOnline: ‘Allen has been sentenced to one of the longest tariffs in prison imposed by the Courts in Northern Ireland in recent years.
‘The Public Prosecution Service has a duty to consider any formal offer from the defence for a defendant to plead guilty to a different charge or charges than those originally presented in court. In this case, a decision to prosecute Allen for four counts of murder and one count of arson endangering life with intent was taken in May 2019.
‘Allen’s legal representatives subsequently made a formal offer in June 2023 for Allen to plead guilty to one count of manslaughter, three counts of murder, and one of arson endangering life with intent.
‘Having carefully considered all the relevant facts and circumstances of the case, and taken the view of very experienced senior prosecuting counsel, it was determined that accepting this plea was the correct course to follow. All decision making in this case was taken in line with the PPS Code for Prosecutors.’
In evidence to psychiatrist Dr Kennedy he said Allen and Denise had regular sex using handcuffs, ropes and other sex toys.
He moved to live with her and her family in Scotland soon after they met before a nomadic lifestyle that took them to County Kerry in the Republic of Ireland in 2017, then County Cavan after Irish social workers became involved.
They were soon on the move again, over the border to County Fermanagh. And by February 2018 Northern Ireland social services were on the verge of intervening before Allen committed his heinous crimes.
The grim conditions for Denise and her family was spelled out in court, including for 16-year-old Roman, whose life must have been ‘miserable’ it was said as he ‘was not attending school, who was denied teenage companionship and who was being shunted from one place with which he had no connection to another.’
This image of a controlling slave-like existence was borne out by local mechanic and garage owner Cathal McGovern, who spoke to the MailOnline when we visited Derrylin, and told us he had cause to meet Roman once when the youngster asked if him if he had ‘any work going’.
Cathal said: ‘He told me his names was Quinn. I told him, ‘No problem, I’ll find something you can do.’ But I never saw him after that.
‘It was about four weeks before that [tragedy] happened. I never once seen him [Allen] but I did see the young lad and told him I’d give him work.
‘A fella later told me he [Allen] gave that cub an awful beating.
‘This farmer had him moving cattle and he had an accident with a chainsaw, but he never went to a doctor or anything.
‘I’ve a funny feeling that’s why the cub never came back down to me after.’
The family was reclusive, lived entirely on benefits, the children were not in nursery or school and it has since emerged that the killer was deep ‘in a fantasy world’ revolving around habitual use of sex chat rooms and role-playing computer games.
It later emerged that Allen and his family had been using different names ever since they arrived in the area.
Their landlord Tommy Fee revealed at the time of the fire that Allen was going by the name Sam Quinn.
Denise had been using the name Crystal, her daughter Sabrina called herself Diane and he had been told that Roman was called Edward. He did not know the baby’s name.
The bungalow was so overwhelmed with flames that initial investigations – and the secretive way the family live – made it difficult for police to establish how many people were inside.
Allen started the fire by soaking strips of fabric in heating oil and putting them throughout the house before setting the building alight.
Crucially, Allen emerged from the catastrophic event unscathed, prompting Mr Justice O’Hara to express his curiosity at a hearing in Belfast last week, stating: ‘It’s curious. One person doesn’t escape at all, and the other person escapes pretty much entirely uninjured.’
Allen’s ‘unstable and unhappy background’ was also explored – his parents separated when he was two and by 12 he left his mother’s care ‘because of physical and sexual abuse from some of her partners’.
He also has a conviction from July 2015 ‘for a threat to kill an ex-partner who accused him of rape’ but after sentencing was deferred he later failed to appear in court in March 2016, with a bench warrant for his arrest issued two months later but ‘no further action is recorded as having being taken, perhaps because the defendant ‘disappeared’ to Scotland where he joined Denise Gossett.’
Defence counsel Frank O’Donoghue KC painted a grim picture of Allen’s life, describing it as ‘chaotic’ and deeply impacted by mental health issues, asserting that Allen lived in a ‘fantasy’ world, often online, rather than reality.
In 2018, he was remanded in Maghaberry Prison and for six months in 2020, he was transferred to Shannon Clinic in Belfast, an intensive psychiatric rehabilitation facility.
When first formally arraigned in 2020, Allen denied the charges as well as one count of arson endangering life.
A defence barrister would later confirm a consultant psychiatrist conducted an examination of Allen which ‘does not support diminished responsibility and we no longer have evidence to support that’.
During a subsequent hearing in 2022, Allen altered his plea, accepting the charges of manslaughter concerning two adult victims. As the legal proceedings advanced, the case was scheduled for a hearing in June of the same year, with a jury sworn in and preparations under way for a trial at Dungannon Crown Court in Craigavon.
However, on the morning the trial was set to commence, Allen’s senior barrister requested a re-arraignment, introducing a pivotal moment in this case. Allen confessed to the murders of Sabrina, Roman, and baby Morgana, while maintaining his stance regarding Denise, acknowledging her death as manslaughter by way of a suicide pact.
The prosecution counsel deemed the lesser plea in relation to Denise acceptable, setting the stage for a decision by Mr Justice O’Hara. Addressing Allen directly, the presiding judge declared: ‘You have pleaded guilty to three counts of murder, and I sentence you to life imprisonment.’
The tragedy has shocked many on both sides of the Irish Sea. Allen showed no emotion as he was jailed for a minimum of 29 years for killing three generations of the same family almost six years ago to the day.
The judge told him he would not be eligible for parole until 2047 – but there have been calls for a whole life term to be imposed.
According to Allen, he was supposed to handcuff himself to another bed as part of the alleged suicide pact with partner Denise – but changed his mind and stood on the doorstep instead.
‘I am sorry I started the fire. I promised to bring them to the next life,’ Allen said according to witnesses.
‘They didn’t want to stay here anymore. They didn’t want to be buried’, he went on.
The suicide pact he claimed to have agreed on was apparently because he and Denise saw themselves as failed parents. But the full truth will never be known.
Landlord Tommy Fee, who owned the bungalow and has now torn it down, described seeing the killer and arsonist looking like a ‘psychopath’ in his ‘bare feet and screaming’.
He was the first on the scene after receiving a call from a concerned neighbour and he raised the alarm, phoning the fire brigade on the way.
Tommy said: ‘I half expected when I got there to maybe see them all out of the house with blankets around them, but that wasn’t the case.
Allen’s hands were in the air. He was shouting, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. He was in his bare feet and looked like a psychopath.’
Rodney Edwards, now editor of the local paper The Impartial Reporter, was the first journalist to the scene.
He said: ‘As the first journalist arriving at the scene that fateful morning, the vivid memories remain etched in my mind.
‘The atmosphere was eerie, permeated by the lingering scent of smoke that hung heavy in the air, encapsulating the shock and gravity of the situation.
‘Specialist officers erected four white tents on a farmyard next to the fire. A chimney and part of the gable wall of the property were knocked down for safety reasons.
‘After the bodies were retrieved, they were taken down the snow-covered lane for post-mortem examination as neighbours looked on’.
James Dickens, who is married to Denise’s daughter Samantha, said the family were ‘heartbroken’.
He said: ‘No matter how many thoughts and prayers there are and how much community support there is, we have lost four members of the family, we have lost three generations at once.’
Initially handing down a term of 33 years, Mr Justice O’Hare reduced this to 29 years on the basis of Allen’s admissions, saving the necessity for a trial but he stated: ‘There’s a very dangerous and disturbing part of his makeup that led to these deaths.’
Outside the court in Belfast, Samantha Gossett, daughter of Denise, said ‘my beautiful mother was taken from me’. She added: ‘My younger brother and sister, Roman and Sabrina, along with Sabrina’s wee baby Morgan are all gone too.
‘And it breaks my heart to think on what happened – to think on how they died.
‘It is hard to move on with our lives, and my life will never be the same again. But the support of everyone, especially my partner and friends, has truly meant such a lot.’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/articles.rss
Martin Robinson
